Genetic Affinities of the Central Indian Tribal Populations

Abstract

BackgroundThe central Indian state Madhya Pradesh is often called as ‘heart of India’ and has always been an important region functioning as a trinexus belt for three major language families (Indo-European, Dravidian and Austroasiatic). There are less detailed genetic studies on the populations inhabited in this region. Therefore, this study is an attempt for extensive characterization of genetic ancestries of three tribal populations, namely; Bharia, Bhil and Sahariya, inhabiting this region using haploid and diploid DNA markers.Methodology/Principal FindingsMitochondrial DNA analysis showed high diversity, including some of the older sublineages of M haplogroup and prominent R lineages in all the three tribes. Y-chromosomal biallelic markers revealed high frequency of Austroasiatic-specific M95-O2a haplogroup in Bharia and Sahariya, M82-H1a in Bhil and M17-R1a in Bhil and Sahariya. The results obtained by haploid as well as diploid genetic markers revealed strong genetic affinity of Bharia (a Dravidian speaking tribe) with the Austroasiatic (Munda) group. The gene flow from Austroasiatic group is further confirmed by their Y-STRs haplotype sharing analysis, where we determined their founder haplotype from the North Munda speaking tribe, while, autosomal analysis was largely in concordant with the haploid DNA results.Conclusions/SignificanceBhil exhibited largely Indo-European specific ancestry, while Sahariya and Bharia showed admixed genetic package of Indo-European and Austroasiatic populations. Hence, in a landscape like India, linguistic label doesn't unequivocally follow the genetic footprints.

A diffusion based study of population dynamics: Prehistoric migrations into South Asia

“…We present data in Table 1 (as well as in Fig 6) for the latitude and longitude of the locations of each tribe whose genetic composition with regard to contributions from the major ancestral groups have been provided by Sharma et al [48] and Basu et al [14]. The results of our simulations (Fig 4F) seem to offer suggest that the proportions of genetic contributions in various tribes should have a longitude dependence for roughly similar values of latitude.…”

Genetic Structure of Tibeto-Burman Populations of Bangladesh: Evaluating the Gene Flow along the Sides of Bay-of-Bengal

“…East Asian specific Haplogroup F1 was observed highest among all the studied populations (Table 1 and Table S1), and shared their closest haplotypes with Northeast Indian populations. In contrast to the high endogamy observed among other Indian populations [8]–[12], the massive haplogroup sharing among all the three populations suggest that the maternal boundaries in this region is highly permeable (Table 1). …”

“…To see the population structure and ancestry components among the studied population and surrounding groups, we have studied previously used 50 Ancestry Informative Markers (AIMs) [12], [20] and combined them with the same numbers of markers extracted from the literature [21], [22]. Four markers failed from the 99% quality control, therefore, we have used 46 AIMs for further analysis.…”

Association of ACE <i>DD</i> Genotype with Hypertension among the Tribal Populations of South India

“…Numerous studies were reported at the context of disease epidemiology and genetics, upon various indian tribal communities, who are highly isolated both demographically and topogra phically, from the mainstream indian populations [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16].…”